Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

by Hunter S. Thompson

“That poor fool should have stayed where he was,” said my attorney. “Punks like that just get in the way when they try to be serious.”

Both of their buggies were covered with ominous symbols: Screaming Eagles carrying American Flags in their claws,

I can’t be the only one who feels a similar loathing in the pit of their stomach when I seem symbols like this on trucks, or the newer stylized blacked-up US flags with blue bands

Who are these people? These faces! Where do they come from? They look like caricatures of used-car dealers from Dallas. But they’re real. And, sweet Jesus, there are a hell of a lot of them—still screaming around these desert-city crap tables at four-thirty on a Sunday morning.

I think this every time I travel through LAS airport, early some morning and there are normal looking freaks coming and going, all playing them damn slots.

This place is like the Army: the shark ethic prevails—eat the wounded. In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

What sells, today, is whatever Fucks You Up—whatever short-circuits your brain and grounds it out for the longest possible time. The ghetto market has mushroomed into suburbia. The Miltown man has turned, with a vengeance, to skin-popping and even mainlining … and for every ex-speed freak who drifted, for relief, into smack, there are 200 kids who went straight to the needle off Seconal. They never even bothered to try speed.